Castro is alive and well. Several U.S. Congressmen visited him and his brother, Raul.

Arnold Schwarzenegger puts four letters into one letter!

Hopefully, Adam Lambert’s new C.D. is better than it looks.

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I spy with my little eye… Cuban spies uncovered.

Courtesy of The Guardian

We at USDemocrazy are starting to think that this presidency deal isn’t so bad. Federally-funded trips to Europe and the Caribbean (no pirates)? Sign us up!

Wait — these are business trips? With every eyeball on the planet watching your every move? Oh, never mind.

A lot of attention has been paid to Obama’s performance at the Summit of the Americas. Eyebrows were raised when Top Yank Obama and Venezuela’s leader (and Top anti-Yank) Hugo Chavez smiled and shook hands in front of cameras and onlookers the world ’round. The Obama administration (and Deputy White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest), went out if their way to keep the handshake hand-wringing in hand:

It was good manners, and it was friendly. But it doesn’t signify a significant change or a dramatic change in the relationship between our two countries.

There’s still pretty good evidence that the relationship between the U.S. and Venezuela are at least evolving a little bit, since the Venezuelans want to send an ambassador to the United States — something the White House would be pretty happy with.

Chavez even gave Obama a gift, but not one that might have been on Obama’s wish list (unless he is a closet appreciator of leftist Ecuadorean literature). After Chavez gifted Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent to Mr. President, the book shot to the top of Amazon.com’s bestseller list. Wow!

Jokingly suggesting that Chavez had penned the book, Obama remarked,

I was going to give him one of mine.

In addition to all the Chavez news, Obama also called for a new direction on US relations with Cuba. Last week, you might remember Obama ended the embargo on travel and sending money to U.S. citizens’ Cuban relatives. (In case you’re experiencing memory loss, or just weren’t paying attention that day in history class, here’s our explanation.) The Summit of the Americas seemed like a perfect opportunity for the U.S. to test some new rhetoric involving the island nation.

Suffice it to say that Obama’s Caribbean trip was no vacation. Obama remarked that the Summit was “productive.” We’ll say…

NOT GUILTY! Blago is back (with a vengeance).

More please. Castro wants more from the US.

Twitter Bad? The risks of tweeting.

Okay… Hands up anybody who remembers the Cold War? And communism? And the Cuban Missile Crisis? And that movie Thirteen Days? 

Well, we here at USDemocrazy have recently learned from top intelligence reports (OK, a news article in the Washington Post)  that President Obama wants us to forget all that stuff.

You see, President Obama has decided to nudge open ever-so-slightly the door of friendship to Cuba.

He is giving the green light for  Americans with family members in Cuba to go and visit the beseiged island nation whenever they want. More importantly, he wants them to spend however much money they want.

Spend money? What’s the big deal about that you may ask…? We at USDemocrazy consider ourselves experts at spending money.  This new spending spree is different. Let us tell you why. (We always do!)

Back during the Cold War, the U.S. had some serious issues with the spread of communism around the world. The U.S. felt seriously threatened when Cuba, a nation at America’s doorstep, turned to communism under Fidel Castro. 

To isolate this perceived red menace, the US employed economic embargoes on Cuba. Fifty years later, those embargoes (and communism) still stand.

To make a long story short (you can read it all on Wikipedia anyway…), among those embargoes were restrictions to keep American people and money out of Fidel Castro’s commie grip. Some of these historic embargoes are now history.

President Obama has decided to start a new era on Cuban-American relations. You can read all about the newly-lifted restrictions here, as well as what this move means for Cuban-American relations. 

So, maybe you can’t cross into Cuba to buy a bunch of cigars just yet… but it is encouraging to see some of these old embargoes going up in smoke.